Joichi Ito

Joichi is the Director of the MIT Media Lab and the Chairman of the Board of PureTech Health. He is also on the Board of Sony Corporation, The New York Times Company, The MacArthur Foundation, The Knight Foundation, and The Mozilla Foundation and the co-founder and board member of Digital Garage. He is a member of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Center of Innovation (COI) STREAM governance committee. He is a Visiting Executive Researcher of Keio Research Institute and the Internet & Society Lab at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. He is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Wikia, Flickr, Kickstarter, Path, littleBits, Formlabs and other companies. He maintains a weblog where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know. He is a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, an Emergency First Responder Instructor and a Divers Alert Network (DAN) Instructor Trainer.

Ito was listed by Time magazine as a member of the "Cyber-Elite" in 1997. Ito was listed as one of the 50 "Stars of Asia" by BusinessWeek and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in 2000. He was selected by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow", chosen by Newsweek as a member of the "Leaders of The Pack" in 2005, and listed by Vanity Fair as a member of "The Next Establishment" in 2007. Ito was named by Businessweek as one of the “25 Most Influential People on the Web” in 2008. In 2011, Foreign Policy Magazine chose him as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”. In 2011, he received the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Oxford Internet Institute in recognition of his role as one of the world's leading advocates of Internet freedom. In 2011 and 2012 Nikkei Business chose Ito as one of the “100 Most Influential People” for the future of Japan. Ito received the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from The New School in 2013. On March 11, 2014, Ito was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Festival Hall of Fame. Also in 2014, Ito was awarded the “Golden Plate Award” by the Academy of Achievement. In 2015, Ito was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Tufts University.